Nanny government

An affliction bedevils the minds of politicians — especially, though not exclusively, those of the Democrat persuasion. A voice keeps crying out inside their heads, “There oughta be a law!” Which means ultimately that we’re all bedevilled by this affliction.

There are thousands upon thousands of laws. And there are tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of regulations pursuant thereto. And there are myriad court rulings explicating these laws and regulations. Many of these court rulings on the meanings of these laws and regulations are as much a roll of the speculative dice as are the judgment calls of haruspices after examining the entrails of birds.

The latest manifestation of this urge to proclaim law is a bill hatching in the New Jersey legislature with the aim of banning parents from seeking conversion therapy to “cure” a minor child of being gay.

The politicians who favor such meddling into parental prerogatives say that such therapy is a fool’s errand and likely harmful in the bad bargain — that such therapy is roundly condemned by the psychiatric mainstream. All true, we suspect. The prevailing psychiatric assessment regarding such therapy should give any parent considering it serious pause.

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But that very same psychiatric “expertise” should give progressive-minded public scolds pause as well. Until fairly recent years, the consensus of the psychiatric expertise was that homosexuality is a psychological disorder — and one that could be eradicated by the shrinks’ professional ministrations.

Sigmund Freud himself declared so, as later so did his famed psychoanalyst daughter Anna. This unhesitant, fully confident, mainstream diagnosis reigned through the decades. Adhering to the view was a veritable Who’s Who of psychatric heavyweights around the world, including but not limited to Felix Boehm, Sandor Ferencz, Edmund Bergler and Wilhelm Stekel.

Homosexuality came to be officially listed as a malady in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, with the approval of the impressive likes of the American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association.

This assessment was finally removed from the manual owing more to political activism than to research findings. The origins of homosexuality — genetic, environmental? — remain an unsolved mystery to this day. Most folks have come to accept, meanwhile, that gays are gay because, well, they just are. When homosexuality was finally removed from the manual of disorders, in 1973, the belated move came in a fairly close vote. That’s right, a vote — not a research finding. (The vote was 58 percent in favor of removal.)

Our belief is that same-sex relationships among consenting adults are nobody’s damn buiness and are part of Americans’ pursuit-of-happiness birthright (marriage included). But this is not to say legislatures should go off half-cocked banning conversion therapy, however ill-advised such therapy may be. Such a ban is a move toward the ever-present slippery slope. If conversion therapy is offically objected to as based on a mixture of myth and bias with maybe religious scruples sprinkled in, what comes next in the way of a “need” for governmental intervention?

Some parents are repressively strict in their child-rearing approaches. At the other pole, some are irresponsibly permissive. Any number of psychologists surely can be assembled to make the case for official intervention regarding either extreme.

Do we really want a state bureaucracy armed with even more statutory/regulatory authority adding officially favored child-rearing practices to its panoramic enforcement purview?